7digital Development Team Productivity Report 2013

Last year we published data on the productivity of our development team at 7digital, which you can read about here.

We've completed the productivity report for this year and would again like to share this with you. We've now been collecting data from teams for over 4 years with just under 4,000 data points collected over that time. This report is from April 2012 to April 2013.

New to this year is data on the historical team size (from January 2010), which has allowed us to look at the ratio of items completed to the size of the team and how the team size compares to productivity. There's also some analysis of long term trends over the entire 4 years.

In general the statistics are very positive and show significant improvements in all measurements against the last reported period:

a 31% improvement in Cycle Times for all work items

a 43% improvement in Cycle Times for Feature work

a 108% increase in Throughput for all work items

a 54% increase in Throughput for Feature work

a 103% improvement in the ratio of Features to Production Bugs

a 56% increase in the amount of Items completed per person per month

a 64% increase in the amount of Features completed per person per month

The report includes lots of pretty graphs and background on our approach, team size and measurement definitions.

A brief summary of the last 4 years:

Apr09-Apr11* Cycle Time improved (but not Throughput or Production Bugs)

Apr11-Apr12 Throughput & Cycle Time improved (but not Production Bugs)

Apr12-Apr13 All three measurements improved!

*The first productivity report collated 2 years’ worth of data.

It’s really pleasing to see we’re finally starting to get a handle on Production Bugs and generally things continuing to improve. It’s interesting to see this pattern for improvement. We haven’t got any particularly good explanation for why things happened in that order and curious if other organisations have seen similar patterns or had different experiences. We’d expect it varies from organisation to organisation as the business context has a massive influence. 7digital is no different from any other organisation in that you have to be able to balance short term needs against long term goals. If anything else our experiences just further support the fact that real change takes time.

We must add the caveat that these reports do not tell us whether we're working on the right things, in the right order or anything else really useful! They're just statistics and ultimately not a measure of progress or success. However we’re strong believers in the concept that you’ve got to be able to “do it right” before you can “do the right thing”, supported by the study by Shpilberg et al, Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT.

We hope you find this information useful and can help other teams justify following best practices like Continuous Delivery in their organisations. We would of course be interested in any feedback or thoughts you have. Please contact me via twitter: @robbowley or leave a comment if you wish to do so.

Today marks the beginning of the Technical Academy Tour as Academy Coordinator, Miles Pool, VP Technology, Paul Shannon and later, former apprentice, Mia Filisch head out across the UK to talk about our Technical Academy.

Continuous learning has always been part of the culture at 7digital and the Technical Academy allowed us to focus those ideas and start hiring apprentices. Changing the team entry requirements and providing a defined period of training allowed us to attract people from more diverse backgrounds and has increased the proportion of female developers in our team; it’s also strengthened the culture of learning and knowledge sharing at every level.

Since I started at 7digital I’ve loved our belief in continuous improvement. Throughout our history as a company we have had a number of influential women working in various parts of organisation yet I knew there was more we could do to improve the diversity of our tech team.

Here at 7digital, we see the relationship between the customer and the developer as one of the most important aspects of software development. We treat software development as more of a craft than an engineering discipline. Craftsmen back in the day would have constant communication with their customers, receiving regular visits from their customer to discuss progress and alterations as the item takes shape.

Over the last twenty years, the agile software movement and extreme programming in particular has championed this with its short iterations, customer showcases and active customer participation in the creation of features.

7digital software developer Mia Filisch attended the October 28th Velocity conference in Amsterdam. She was kind enough to share her account of the core takeaways here with us. She found that the core recurring theme around security was enough to inspire some internal knowledge sharing sessions she has already started scheming on. The diversity of insights led to a productive and informative conference. See below for her notes.